“Getting saved” in terms of culture

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I was born and raised in a religious world where “getting saved” was a mandate.  And, I might add that I still see it as a valid cultural initiation to spirituality but I fear it is often misused.  Too many times the concept is introduced and promulgated in a culture of manipulation and fear…terror even…and young children are “saved” before they have any idea of what they are doing.  And when they are introduced to religion in that atmosphere and if they continue to live there, they often to do not allow their spirituality to deepen and mature.

We must not fail to recognize the socio-cultural dimension of spirituality/religion.  That is one fundamental dimension that is often overlooked.  When spirituality/religion is not allowed to mature, when it continues to be only a socio-cultural phenomena, the deeper meaning is not allowed to develop.

O’bama faking terrorist threat!!!!

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“Yeah, O’Bama and his cohorts are making up this terrorist threat for 9/11 just to divert attention from a failing economy!”

No, once again, I don’t really believe that.  I made it up!   But if I happen to hate him and/or “liberals”, I am inclined to interpret news in a fashion to confirm my bias and therefore arouse passions in similarly uncritical thinkers to hate him/them like I do.  It is similar to the prophets of doom and catastrophe-monger-ers–they are full of existential insecurity and dread (i.e. the poison of self-loathing) and thus compulsively announce, “The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  The simpleton “birthers” and “O’bama is a Muslim” crowd are guilty of the same lack of critical thinking.

Now, conservatives are going to interpret O’Bama and liberalism from their perspective.  And they should!  We need different perspectives, certainly the conservative one.  But it is important that conservatives, or liberals, or libertarians pause briefly before they make pronouncements and consider, “Now, am I just grinding my axe again?”  Now most of us will, after that pause, go right ahead and grind our axe.  I know I will!  But it is important to pause, and in that pause, from time to time we might learn that there is another way of looking at things.  And, it is important to look at things differently on occasion.

And this touches on a core issue in our culture right now—what is real and what is unreal.  I am of the conviction (i.e. “bias”) that “real” is a very nebulous term.  We are now at a point in our species development where we need to embrace the nebulous nature of reality and be willing to re-define a lot of the “categories” that we fall into and into which we project our world.  But this kind of “sophistry” is anathema to the hyper-conservatives who are not willing, or able, to compromise with what they know to be “real.”  An old fundamentalist bromide sums up this attitude, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”

 

 

Be nice!

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I watched the Republican debate last night and was made aware of how important it is to “be nice.”  Even when we have strong feelings about something…such as political issues…it is important to realize that we can still “be nice” even as we feel very intensely.  As the two parties gear up for the 2012 election, it is important to remember that it is kind of like being on the playground and choosing sides for some scrap football game, then wanting, re the opponent, “to kick their ass.”  It is fun to win and part of the energy flowing on the political scene is that of a horse race….if I might switch metaphor here…and I want my pony to win.

And the need to “be nice” is always present.  As I lead my day-to-day life, there are often feelings of unpleasantness re other people I come in contact with.   And I try to practice “mindfulness” and recognize these thoughts and feelings as they come.  And it is often very helpful to remember the notion of “random acts of kindness” and respond appropriately.

The media is so often “not nice.”  It is almost as if they seek stories to hold out before us in which someone has acted foolishly and shamefully.  It is so rewarding to listen to or read of these people and snicker, laugh, or heap scorn upon them.  I often think of Michael Jackson and how he became a scapegoat for us.  Sure, he was….well…Michael Jackson.  Michael made some horrible choices because he wrestled with deep-seated personal demons.  But we went too far in ridicule of him.  I recently read where he had acknowledged this experience and how it made him feel.—“Yeah, Wacko Jacko, where did that come from? Some English tabloid. I have a heart and I have feelings. I feel that when you do that to me. It’s not nice.”

Michael suffered a lot in his life, and caused suffering to others, but we didn’t have to demonize him.  When I was a child we had “the village idiot” and it was so fun to view him with contempt, scorn, and derisive humor.  But it was “not nice.”  So, today, let’s all “be nice!”

All Republicans are racist!!!!!!!

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The Republican party is united against President O’Bama and O’Bama is a black man.  Ip so facto, all Republicans are racist.

Well, actually I don’t think this is so.  BUT, why not say that it is so, and say so with vehemence and self-assuredness, and do so on the “lame-street media”, and therefore make it so. For, most people do not watch or read the news with any discrimination and believe whatever is presented to them as fact.  This is particularly so with the right-wing of the conservative movement.  They live on a steady diet of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh (and his ilk), and conservative religion.  And they are now dug in at the heels.  And, they hate O’Bama and I do suspect that with the fringe element there is a racist dimension to their acrimony.

It is fascinating to watch what Limbaugh, Fox News, and Company have done with the “O’Bama is a Muslim” and “O’Bama in not an American” stuff.  There are millions of people who believe that non-sense and do so because that is what has been presented to them and because it feeds the poison that festers in their heart.   Sure, liberals are not objective either.  But they are much more likely to have a healthy self-doubt and be aware that they are not objective.  Such a perspective makes some allowance that other view points have some degree of validity.

The core issue here is, “What is real and what is unreal?”  Hermeneutical willingness is the issue.  Each of us interprets his/her world and does so on a daily, minute-by-minute basis.  The more conservative one is the less likely is it that he/she will grasp the flimsiness of his/her perspective and be willing to consider other interpretations of reality.  That is the reason I subscribe to my particular bias–liberal Democrat!  So don’t dare confront me with anything which might challenge this assumption!  And let me gravitate to a social context that has the same bias and then all will be well with the world.

(On the last note, I hope you are not ironically-challenged!)

 

Purity and Danger

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Mary Douglas, a noted anthropologist, wrote a very provocative book in 1966 entitled, Purity and Danger.  In this book she explains the origin of a need for purity in primitive tribes and the perceived “danger” of impurity.  (And though I hear described this as a “perceived” danger, that is not to dismiss the very real danger of impurity run amok.  Boundaries are necessary.)

I was raised in a sectarian, fundamentalist church which also emphasized purity and did so to excess.  It emphasized rules and regulations to a fault, believing that the essential dimension of Christian piety was combating the forces of darkness, inside and outside.  And to those who failed to live up to those standards there was always a hefty dollop of shame and guilt that was heaped upon them.  In retrospect, I now see that shame and guilt was the essence of their belief system.

We have modern-day examples of purity run amok.  The best one is the Taliban.  It was interesting, though horrifying, to watch them rise to power as they emphasized purity morally, politically, and socially.  But purity when it is running amok always runs out of grist for its mill when its primary focus is within its own ranks.  At some point the machinery of purity has done all it can do within its own ranks and has to turn its focus outside, seeking to purify the world.  Unfortunately for groups like this, the outside world always has a mind of its own and fights back.

Now there is nothing wrong with purity.  It is an essential dimension of human experience.  But mature purity will recognize that the impurity that it resists cannot be obliterated and that the very effort to obliterate it will result in a catastrophe if balance is not found.  As Jung noted, “What we resists, persists.”  The goal is to acknowledge the presence of impurity in our hearts and actions but to consciously pursue the pure instead.  And I think that the Christian obligation to “confess ours sins, one to another” (James 5:16) is a ritual that facilitates this recognition of impurity and provides an opportunity for catharsis.

story telling

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When I was a child, “story-telling” was just another expression for lying.  If someone said something that we saw as false, we would immediately declare with great passion, “That is not so!   That is a story!”  If someone had a history of telling falsehood, he/she was labeled with heavy opprobrium, “He/she is a story-teller.”  Even a benign “story”…such as a fairy tale…was a “story” because it was clearly made up.  The implicit assumption of that cultural verbal contrivance was that there was an objective reality and anything that differed was “a story.”

But story-telling was being maligned.  Story-telling is a wonderful way of conveying information; one could even say, “truth.”  And, technically the best we can every do is to tell stories and even history itself is a story that has evolved over the millennia.  Let’s take U.S. history, for example.  When I was taught this subject in the mid-sixties I found the subject fascinating and didn’t have to worry about critical reading or anything like that.  The story of U.S. history was merely a factual account of what had happened and I found it very interesting.  It was only in college that I learned to approach history…and the rest of our knowledge-base…with a critical mind.

Another powerful story in my youth was the Christian tradition.  But it was not presented as a “story”; it was presented as a factual account of what had happened two thousand years earlier with the life of Jesus.  I now see that too as a “story” but with that approach I have been able to glean great meaning which would have eluded me otherwise.  I see Jesus as an historical character who was an extraordinary spiritual presence.  The early Christians were captivated by the story of his life and death.  And they had little difficulty in believing that, yes, he had been raised from the dead.  These early believers perpetuated this story and contributed significantly to it.  Christian history has from that point been an unfolding of this original story, an unfolding that continues even today.

Let me close with an observation made by Harry Crews in the story of his own life:  Nothing is allowed to die in a society of a storytelling people.  It is all—the good and the bad—carted up and brought along from one generation to the next.  And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it..

It is important that we formulate and tell our stories.

Paradigm shifts

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An old bromide I’ve subscribed to is, “What we see is what we are.”  Anais Nin put it this way, “”We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”   And I know I’m harping on this theme but am doing so because I know it has been so helpful to me personally and I think it is very relevant to our world, especially our divided political world.  Nikos Kazantzakis in his wonderful book, Report to Greco, quotes an old Byzantine mystic, “Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes with which we see reality.”

So today, I urge each of us to just give this a try.  As we are making pronouncements upon the world, our private and our public world, let us pause for a moment and practice mindfulness.  In that pause, let us ask, “Now what does this say about me?”

And then we might have to follow the advice of T. S. Eliot and, for a moment or two, “live in the breakage, in the collapse of what was believed in as most certain, and therefore the fittest for renunciation.”
 

 

“po white trash”

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Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. … It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.  (Harry Crews)

Crews was born and raised in the deep South (Georgia and Florida) and raised in abject, “po white trash” poverty. In his novels and in his biography he eloquently describes the hardship of living on the periphery of the social body, the daily struggles involved in a hand-to-mouth existence. It is grim, to say the least, and often violent He is sometimes likened to William Faulkner in this depiction of “po white trash” living. Crews and Faulkner also bring to my mind Flannery O’Connor who wrote about the same experience of the Southern dispossessed, and did so with excellence, although she did not hail from that culture.

Crews made his escape from the wretched existence that was his fate. And he did so by getting educated and discovering a facility with words. And with this literary skill he was able to depict so eloquently the alienation that he was born into, an alienation which is relevant to people from various cultures. For, alienation is not the exclusive domain of “po white trash.”

In the quotation offered above, Crews emphasized the importance of looking within, paying attention to the heart’s machinations and noted that most people don’t bother to look there. In fact, the prospect of looking there is off-putting to them, to say the least. For, to look within is to discover that the heart has its “beastly little treasures” (I think it was Auden who coined that term). And the first casual observation of this “beast” is enough to thwart any further venture into the “heart of darkness.” And, all of us have this “heart of darkness” even if we do not deign to look there. And, we don’t have to look there because we look around us and see darkness abounding, not realizing that part of that darkness out there is merely our own projection. As Karl Jung said, “What we resists persists” and does so in the form of our projections.

 

Listening

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It must have been exhilarating when we learned to talk, when we learned to assign meaning to our “these squeaks of ours” (Conrad Aiken), and to recognize that these meanings were by and large shared with others.  And even now it is very rewarding when we share something very personal, something rich in emotional valence, and intuitively know that the one listening understands.  Aiken noted, “And this is peace; to know our knowledge known.”  This is the heart of the therapeutic enterprise—being a good listener.  (And I’m made to think of the opposite of “listening”, recognized in this line from some old tv show, “You aren’t listening.  You’re waiting.”)

Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci had profound insight into the enterprise of listening:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them.  (from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.)

The wrath of god

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Michelle Bachman noted Sunday re the recent natural disasters, “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?'”

So Bachman again trotted out her Old Testament world view but then, conferring with her handlers, realized this was imprudent and tried to explain she was only speaking in jest.  “No, Michelle.  You can’t get out that easy.  Your mind is teeming with that…ahem…stuff.”   Her religious affiliations and her speech has been replete with material which reflects the view of God as some vengeful, punitive tyrant.  And, as is always the case, our perspective on God always reflects our perspective on life itself and reflects our own view point on life.  As the Bible says, “As a man speaketh, so is he.”  And, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

And, this perspective she offers is the reason she is a marketable political commodity in our current world.  Our country has millions of people who function on the basis of “concrete operational thinking.”  (See Jean Piaget re stages of cognitive development.)